Originally published June 26 2005
Bush administration resists requiring more specificity on food labels
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Some consumer groups think food companies should be required to specify what percentage of any given ingredient is in a food (a practice known in Europe as characterizing), reports The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, but the food industry and the Bush administration say the current requirements of listing ingredients in order by weight is good enough, and anything more may interfere with "proprietary" recipes.
Good things come in packages that spell out exactly how frosted those flakes are and how many veggies are in that vegetable soup.
That's the message consumer advocates are promoting in a push for an international standard for labels that would list exactly how much, in percent, of certain ingredients is in packaged food products.
The current U.S. system, which requires listing ingredients in descending order by weight, is just fine.
Plus, nutrition labeling tells consumers how much sodium, cholesterol, fats and sugars are in a product.
The issue is to come up at a July meeting in Rome of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international food standard-setting group of more than 160 countries.
But those with global trade would have to comply in countries that adopt the standard.
And many countries, particularly developing countries with growing markets, adopt Codex standards because they lack the resources to set food safety and nutrition rules.
This idea has been around in this country since the late 1970s, when the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture Department and Federal Trade Commission looked at whether they had authority to propose ingredient-percentage labeling.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit advocacy group, petitioned the FDA in 1997 to consider percentage-ingredient labeling for all packaged goods, but it never got a definitive answer from the agency.
The International Association of Consumer Food Organizations, led by CSPI, has lobbied for percentage labeling since 2000 in the world forum.
The report said such labeling creates competition among companies to produce higherquality products.
"We have had ingredient labeling in order of predominance since the 1930s," said Bruce Silverglade, CSPI's legal affairs director.
Silverglade said opposition is intense because developing countries, where big multinational food companies see much of their growth, tend more toward adopting a labeling standard instead of creating one of their own.
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